Integration of optical and SAR remotely sensed data for monitoring wildfires in Mediterranean forests.

Large wildfires in forests of southern European countries such as Portugal, Spain, Greece, France and Italy are one key ecological disturbance of the Mediterranean environment. Optical data have been largely used for burned area mapping and literature provides an extensive reference for the typical spectral signal of burns and the methodologies applied to extract burn perimeters. However, optical remote sensing techniques have the major limitation of a reduced frequency of clear images due to cloud cover; moreover, for the specific application of burned area mapping, unburned targets such as shadows, can be spectrally confused and misclassified as burns. For this reason radar images could be integrated as an additional source of information. We developed an approach for mapping burned areas in Mediterranean regions based on Landsat TM/ETM+ data and vegetation indices that provided satisfactory results. However, we are currently working for further improving our approach by exploiting the synergy between optical and radar data. In this paper we present the first results of the analysis of the SAR backscatter over burned areas for future integration into the formal framework previously developed. Although results are preliminary, they encourage us to test the approach over different regions of the Mediterranean environment to evaluate its robustness.